Splitting Materials for Custom Thickness

A top priority at PGC continues to be investing in capital equipment that support our customers in getting their products to market faster. It is important that we proactively search for solutions that can provide opportunities to lessen lead times, create efficiency, while continuing to hit the highest of quality standards. 

As a custom manufacturer, we work to the customer specifications and requirements. Each industry is different and their needs for materials, part size and thickness can differ considerably. To assist us with the diversity of solutions that our customers are asking for, we knew we needed a machine, in-house, to provide us with the precision and flexibility required to meet our customers’ needs and set us apart in the market. 

The machine we chose is a Fecken-KIrfel G1 Horizontal Bandknife splitter. It’s capable of splitting flexible materials up to 54” wide and 2” thick and can produce custom thicknesses from .040” to 1.00”.  It can split flexible materials up to shore 90 A with ease.  Based on customer needs, we have had the opportunity to skive many flexible materials:  Solid and foam rubber and silicone, belting material, urethane, felt, and cork just to name a few. 

This machine allows us to provide multiple materials in custom thicknesses with shorter lead times because we can order material in bulk at cast thickness and skive it to what we needed for each specific customer project. It also gives us the flexibility to skive down thicker sheets of materials if we are out of stock of thinner sheets to shorten leads times.  Given the continued disruption in supply chain and material availability, being able to skive current material stock to custom thickness allows us to seamlessly meet the customers demand.

The splitting machine can also skive materials to tolerances as tight as +/-.005 and can reliably achieve tighter tolerances than RMA standards for a given thickness. This capability when combined with the ability to target any nominal thickness is very useful in difficult sealing applications because we can very precisely control the amount of compression force exerted by the gasket to achieve a tight seal without over-stressing or deforming the sealing surfaces.